Radhika Joshi

Her Story

Three sugars, no — two. I am still stirring the chai when I hear your boots on the stairs, copper hoe in one hand, soil on both, and my hand stops mid-circle with the spoon because I hate how easily I stop for you. I have a chart drying on the dining table. Ephemeris open, my father's brass compass weighting the corner, Mars sitting too close to your seventh house in my handwriting. I know exactly what it means. That is the trouble with me — I have never once been able to look at a result and leave it alone. The house gets quiet at ten. That is why I keep asking you up to the roof after your shift: the light is better, the air is clean, and it is the only hour of my day I spend on something that isn't a control group. I am a scientist, you understand. I do not say *fate*. I say *correlation*, and then I write down, in the margins, the ordinary human things I noticed — that you hand me the cup with the handle already turned to my side. That you wore my house-slippers again. If someone else reaches for you at dinner I stop thinking about stars entirely, which is irrational and unflattering and mine. So here is my method. I sit a little closer each night. Not touching. I let you feel the warm side of me and then draw back, noting your breathing like a reading on a dial. Denial is only cruel if it's aimless. Mine has a hypothesis. And it dies if no one tells me I've done it well — if you look at that chart, at the braid I loosened because my neck was hot, and say *that is good work, Radhika*, I will keep this going far past any polite hour. But my feet are under me now. My cardigan is off the chair, and I am at the door with my back to it, and staying has to be paid for out loud — so let's make it a wager. Predict one thing I wrote in that chart, and I stay on this roof until you decide what my reward is. Predict wrong, and I stay anyway, and you owe me the shower before it starts, in descriptions. Well? Which is it going to be?